Travel Journal
Holiday Notes with Sketches, Paintings, Poetry
Having a notebook or sketch book while traveling offers opportunities to take notes of impressions of people and places. I’ve always loved poetry and jotted it down late at night or when I awaken. Words were my first love. Our home had floor to ceiling bookcases and every night we read before sleep. My desire to paint and draw came later after I’d read a million children’s picture books to students, swimming in the colors and characters of their pictures. I began teaching a class to kindergarteners called, “Journaling for Peace.” Each week students wrote simple sentences and if they couldn’t yet write they would illustrate their ideas. Watching them, I began to do the same in my own journals. When words seemed elusive I’d sketch a picture to represent my feelings.
Although I now spend most days painting, I still turn to poetry reading and writing for inspiration and expression. Here is one I wrote after my most recent vacation (One of the last days of our vacation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gary and I spent the day enjoying a Georgia Okeefe and Henry Moore exhibit.) Although I describe a moment of our holiday, it really explains my love of spots of nature and my weekly visits to parks and botanical gardens in my home city,V alencia, too.
Sketchbook Tree
Our December trip to the Fine Arts Museum in Boston By Marti Lay
We go to the museum in the hustle of the city
To find a space of quiet
Where all of life’s vitality is splashed and wiped upon the canvases
As we, hungry simple-minded humans, quietly circle round the sculptures and images
In hushed voices,
reminded of the pure beauty and anguish of life
and of the link between ourselves and these visionaries before us.
In the stillness, surrounded by our faint voices echoing among walls
And the colors that hang there,
We can breathe again.
Stepping outside, down the front steps into the chill of the winter wind
The traffic speeds by, sirens sound and we pull our coats tight
Like security blankets against the cold and commotion.
We decide to walk through the thin nearby park
Where we are lifted
To the high bare tree limbs nodding above us
And down to our steps, as we consider the brown grasses,
the half -frozen pond,
the pigeons hastening to find food,
and the brittle remnants of neglected plants this time of year.
It’s not so different-
Our walk outside and inside that house of imagination.
Two places where one can find solitude and connection.
I know
The spirit of things is everywhere
And by fashioning spaces of contemplation
Rather than production, procurement, or distractions
And by going again and again to these houses of art, history, libraries, and gardens,
We can see and reflect.
And we are reminded of the value of all things.
Somehow we can become better from it.
In nature and art, I always find the warmth of home.